I can't believe it's not LiveJournal

Or is it MySpace? Either way it's nice and clean and feels polished, a bit like a big chair (made out of ajax).

Looking at the What's Recent page most people are having a similar reaction to me - e.g. we've all seen a lot of these things before. It's just another step in the land-grab being made by media companies as they realise the power of personal publishing.

What I find interesting in this instance is that it's Six Apart, a company responsible (I should imagine most of us will agree) for pushing personal publishing into the mainstream, that are now following someone else's business model. With Movable Type, Six Apart gave us the tools to quickly and easily publish a diary-style website, as well as some standards that allowed other MT users to share information.

These were all independent operators, however - if I were to romanticise them, free spirits and mavericks. It concerns me that the prevalence of sites such as MySpace are a double-edged sword in terms of personal publishing as we know it. On the one hand, all this free, easy-to-use technology is fantastic for not only giving more people the opportunity to communicate, but also to learn skills. I would hope that many teenagers now know basic HTML, for instance, and understand on some level how the web works, thanks to their time on community sites.

But at the same time I worry that there is a limit, though not necessarily intentional, to this learning. These tools are seen as an easy solution to publishing a blog or other material, but really is isn't that hard to do it yourself. We used to laugh at all the crappy GeoCities home pages (which is all these new sites are, when it comes down to it) but at least they offered greater scope for learning and developing. And they certainly had a lot of character. (By 'character' I mean 'animated GIFs').

Call me Johnny Q Cynic, but aren't we really here due to marketing? We think we're getting a lot of lovely free tools but what we're actually doing is building distinct profiles of ourselves, clustering together in groups according to taste and culture. Maybe that's fine, maybe we're just saving a poor market researcher a bit of legwork - maybe we're ultimately funding Google - but I tell you what: I'm not giving up my own web space yet. I might want to put a giant rotating GIF on there one day and damn it I'm going to relish the opportunity to do so.